Was it his ability? Or were we the ones that had the ability — the ability to see him as able when he was up there on the campaign platform mouthing abstractions? He's still up there — on what Maureen Dowd calls "a balcony" — but now all the concrete problems of the world are his responsibility. He hasn't changed. He hasn't stopped doing something he was able to do before. But we have reached the end of our capacity to idealize him. We don't like him up there, looking down, where things are going so wrong. We are withholding our trust. But rightly so! This ability to trust is not a very impressive ability. Let's be critical. Being critical, we have no reason to talk about whether the President is adequately soothing us.

92 comments:

He has become a 1930s musical: There is no problem, in his eyes, that a speech cannot solve. "There's a huge oil leak that I signed waivers allowing them to ignore regulations? I have the perfect solution! A PHOTO OP!!"

That, mind you, has been his modus operandi for his entire life.

It seems that he's learning that temporary insanity, sadly, is only temporary.

President Obama is an anomaly in American business, and as Silent Cal reminds us, never forget that the business of America is business. The President is the glib, charming VP of HR who somehow gets the top job, except in American business that almost never happens. The HR guys are drones, and get'alongs who foist diversity seminars on the ass kickers who are out in the trenches making money.

The poor bastard still doesn't know what's hit him. Charm school is not the school of hard knocks. He's f*cked and so are we.

James Carville has his faults, but he's no community organizer. When you sh*t in his bsck yard, he fights. It's just round one folks. Look for a knock out in 2012.

This has been a theme in his life at least as far back as his days as a conlaw lecturer - aloof, removed, distant.

Peano is right that many saw through him, but those who didn't were taken in by the same flaw that drew them to his Democrat predecessor who told them, "Ah fee-yul yore pain".

Ann asks if his supporters had the ability to see him as able. Like his Democrat predecessor, the only ability he really has is the ability to tell people what he thinks they want to hear. He's a sociopath who has spent his life cultivating it.

Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a [Harvard] Law Review article that [Prof. Laurence] Tribe wrote titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space."

The show by Obama and his worshipful press sometimes seems to have been a carefully adjusted way to insert the Strong Man Ruler like a Chavez under cover of a self controlled super man. Every single move he has made has been designed to consolidate that total power in himself. The antidote is simple truth telling. Palin started it and slowly the Carvilles and the Matthews from the Clinton years are joining in the chorous, and now Dowd too. A Strong Man Ruler is way too weak for Americans. We are used to working together under an elected Congress and a temporary 4 to 8 year term presiding executive. That has been our strength, under God. A Doofus dictator and his propaganda of all lies all the time just wont work here.

Obama was installed, with the help of the unholy triumpherant of Blacks, the young and dumb, and educated idiots, by New World Order bankers.He is a Non Allegiant, Non Natural Born Citizen Usurper (his father was Never a citizen). Who better to put the final nails in the coffin of the sovereignty of We the People?

Peano said..."He hasn't changed. He hasn't stopped doing something he was able to do before. But we have reached the end of our capacity to idealize him."

You should be clear about who "we" are. Many of us never did "idealize" him. We saw him for the phony he is, and we saw it from the outset of his presidential campaign.

- Bingo. Many of us saw Obama for the inexperienced, empty suit that he was/is, who spouts the same flowery rhetoric over and over again.

Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden, even Barack and Michelle Obama all told us he wasn't experienced enough. All the evidence was there, about his background, his ties, his agenda, but his supporters didn't want to believe it. His relationships, his flipflops and lies, even his plagiarized speeches.

Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a [Harvard] Law Review article that [Prof. Laurence] Tribe wrote titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space."

Bullshit.

Tribe and Obama are not scientists and I doubt either of them could do basic calculus now, let alone have a real understanding of those principals outlined above. They are both very smart (Tribe is brilliant and Obama is bright), but the smarts and skills that work in law school are not the same smarts that work in mathmatics and physics. Yes there are gifted people who can read a book and grasp the concepts, but you still need the math to pull it together and that takes a lot of discipline.

Joe said...The notion that Obama was and is a charismatic figure has always been a joke. He's a dull, handsome man with no personality and less than average intelligence in whom people see what they want to see.

That's pretty much how Obama describes himself, in the video The Crack Emcee linked above. And you are so right!!

oh, boy were you all duped. YOU put him in the balcony, he was never there. He was more like in a closet hiding and now he is out at least for some people who thought they saw him on the balcony. Inspirational, my foot. Do the fucking job you're hired to do. We will inspire ourselves.

Like others, I was never impressed with Obama's oratory, but I WAS afraid of the meaning of his words.

His 'facilitation' of the health care debate was illustrative, where he came across as emotionally immature, arrogant, needy, and unwilling to listen. Any manager would have been censured if they conducted a meeting in such a manner.

In a pragmatic universe, Obama would have been excoriated for his performance that day and re-characterized for the ineffectual, spouting child that he is. A great orator? You've got to be kidding.

Obama analyzed and integrated Einstein's theory of relativity, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, as well as the concept of curved space as an alternative to gravity, for a [Harvard] Law Review article that [Prof. Laurence] Tribe wrote titled, "The Curvature of Constitutional Space."

No doubt Obama just slapped his name on this like he did many bills in the Senate.

I have to wonder about otherwise intelligent people who would idealize a politician in the first place and then whine when the real world intrudes to reveal he is a mere shadow of the man they fantasized about, complain not because he fails to live up to the dream but because it deprives them of the opportunity to continue life inside the magic bubble they wrapped arond him.

"Obama, by contrast, does his homework; he conveys a rare and impressive grasp of difficult subjects when he at last deigns to talk to the news media and reassure those whose lives are overturned by disaster."

Dowd is confusing the POTUS with the TOTUS. Another example of Dowd's orgasmic writing. Get a dildo, Maureen.

You should be clear about who "we" are. Many of us never did "idealize" him. We saw him for the phony he is, and we saw it from the outset of his presidential campaign

Ditto.

I've never understood where the whole image of him as a charismatic, inspiring "Rockstar" came from (when thinking about his personality in total, and not just on stage), other than in the minds of the gullible and feeble. Even from the beginning, I kept wondering to myself, if this guy is so charming and outgoing- then why doesn't anybody from his past seem to know much about him, or want to talk warmly about him? Why was this "rockstar" such a hermit loner at Columbia, and why does nobody seem to recall him even being there? And why are all of his closest friends a collection of misfits and weirdoes (putting it mildly) instead of normal, down-to-earth people?

So then, I figured, he must have the Elvis/Jimi Hendrix/Michael Jackson thing- the quiet, bizarre loner in personal life who morphs into a completely different creature once the stage lights are on and he's in front of screaming crowds. But we all know how those guys ended up...

America, with the help of the press, projected all of the virtues and gifts they wanted in a "hero" onto Obama, and he encouraged it; anyone who could say that on his watch "the planet" would begin to heal and the oceans cease to rise definitely encouraged it.

Some of us saw the man for what he was, payed attention to who his friends were, noted what little record of him ("present!") we were actually able to see, and we understood that there was nothing there but ego and appetite.

For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching. He’ll deal with it, but he’s annoyed because it’s not on his syllabus.

That's how it seems to me too. Iran, unemployment, North Korea, an environmental catastrophe...

these things annoy Obama who wants to do what *he* wants to do. Don't they *get* who he is? :-)

Point of order: in the summer of 2008 Obama had tingles going up legs all over. Not only was he to be our ultimate Black President that could in a stroke redeem us from racial guilt, he was presumed to have tricked the Marxist-leftards and the Muslims and Soros into believing he hated America like they did to get their money to run, but once we elected him as our President, then he would become our friend. That was the level of pixie dust in the brains of the media from which they are only now recovering. McCain was always afraid of that media. Palin tried to give the campaign some guts to fight Obama's pretense of being a noble black man with her "Paling Around with Terrorists" line, and Steve Schmidt immediately defied her and tried to remove her right to speak in public. Palin remains to this day the only one unafraid of taking a fight to the pixilated media and Swami Obama.

Sometimes I feel folks who have a not so hidden guilt about the failures of President Bush now relish the chance to pile on Obama: limited vocabulary, too much golf, poor scholarship, little business sense etc all sound like the criticism made against Bush. But of course now we throw in references Africa to give it a new twist. But I think Dowd nails the tone and late timing of this press conference, but to pile on the president for a collective failure from government officials to big oil's to prevent or contain disasters of this magnitude, which we were promised could not happen seems misplaced. That said I think the oil stained sands of the Gulf will rightly haunt this administration and I hope the oil industry for years to come.

Surprised no one commented on the last lines of Dowd's piece:"Obama should be offering Clinton one... Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief."

I've got to assume Down fully intending the double entendre. And with the "pouty lips" picture she has on her column header one can only assume that Ms. Dowd would love to be the first in line to assist Mr. Clinton in his official duties.

Then again if we elect Sarah Palin, the oil companies and the fake work US bureacracies will be shaped up or shipped out. That is her area of expertise: fighting thru the smoke screens of the Big Oil/ Big Politicians corruption game played for 40 years at the USA's expense.

I've noticed a pattern with out opponent and maybe you have to..we've all heard his dramatic speeches before devoted followers...and there is much to like and admire about our opponent, but listening to him speak it's easy to forget that

...This is a man that has authored two memoirs but not a single major law nor even a reform, not even in the State Senate..

...This is a man who can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word Victory except when he's talking about his own campaign.

But when the cloud of rhetoric has passed, when the roar of the crowd fades away, when the stadium lights go out, and those styrofoam greek column are hauled back to some studio lot...

When that happens what exactly is our opponent's plan? What exactly does he seek to accomplish? (After he's done turning back the waters and healing the planet.)

In the campaign, Obama’s fight flagged to the point that his donors openly upbraided him. In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters.

One of the things that I worried about (only one of many) was that a President isn't allowed to vote "Present".

The Muslim world is ecstatic today. The first anti-jewish American president in my lifetime has gone for Israel's jugular with a nuclear weapons disarmament tactic in a UN resolution that Obama had the USA support while he is pretending he wants to oppose Iran. That level of deception and betrayal of an American ally by Obama's regime is beyond measure. We now know what the important celebration was for over in Farrakhan's neighborhood this weekend.Instead of chanting "kill the pig" at their bar-b-que they were all chanting "kill the jew".

We are quite aware that on any issue there are two way to look at it. The "then again", "on the other hand" and all that useless equivalence designed to make one seem reasonable without having to actually come any conclusions or action. To be a Switzerland in all conflicts, to cover one's ass and risk nothing and to actually do nothing. We see it everyday in this President and it is not leadership nor even the slightest bit useful to anyone except the one covering his ass.

There are a lot of 9/11 conservatives, liberals who changed their politics after 9/11.

I wonder if there turn out to be some BP Spill conservatives, former environmental absolutists who decide that we should stick to drilling in shallower water, developing clean coal and oil shale and build more nuclear generation plants. We have more oil under the surface of the Dakotas and mountain states than all the other proven reserves in Arabia.

That'd be nice - esp nuclear and oil shale, but I doubt it. I think it'll just feed into the "oil is evil" black and white thinking meme w/o the appreciation of the actual energy needs and that wind energy, for example, can't supply them.

Obama cast a Glamour over the electorate. Just over half were affected. The Glamour wore off some of those earlier (like our fair hostess) for others, like Maureen Dowd, the Glamour is failing now. For some, it will never fade.

Dowd writes, "In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters."

First, I don't recall Obama waiting too long to condemn the Tea Party. He also wasted no time in condemning Arizona's S.B. 1070 and the Cambridge Police Department, and he condemns Rush Limbaugh and Fox News every chance he gets.

Maureen Dowd thinks he cares about all those other things, but they don't really hold his interest. He cares about basking in the adoration of crowds, hobnobbing with people like Bono, attacking people who dis him, black identity politics, and radically restructuring the American economy into a form that has failed everywhere it has been tried.

I can understand it. I'm also bored by a lot of things that are supposed to interest me. But I never thought I should be president.

Re: Maureen Dowd's put down.In other words, he's an elitist living in an ivory tower. The reason I suspect many in the media related to him, is because they too are elitists living in ivory towers, and he speaks their language. What they took as competence was his ability to speak on their wavelength. And now we know what elitists in ivory towers actually are. They're aloof technocrats who know very little, have little empathy cannot relate to the average person and feel superior. And rather than competence he brings arrognance and smugness to the table (which is why so many liberals found him so intoxicating - he speaks to their arrogance and smugness. They truly are the ones they were waiting for). Only that doesn't get the job done.Not here, not overseas, nowhere.

Penny -- Well, dude, that's one of the primary reasons I come to this vortex. It is majority conservative and libertarian but there are some very thoughtful leftists as well as a few shrill, stupid ones.

Also, in my opinion, cocooning will never occur on the right because most media institutions are run by and most decent art is created by leftists. So, the other side is always in your face, whereas it's much easier for leftists to shut themselves off from the other side.

phew ! good day to be away from the blogs. you all went to town venting on this one, eh ?

I agree with the professor's response to the Dowd piece. When she said be critical -- I hope she meant be critical of the President's performance AND be critical of your expectation that he soothe you. That later expectation is is really jeuvenille and bizarre in my opinion. A grown woman, and a feminist demanding of the Pres that he soothe her in this way is just pathetic. I think the people that were demanding an update from the President on the gov't response a few weeks ago were right; him not addressing us earlier let this get out of hand.

Obama made promises that only a god could keep and only a fool would believe.

Entire religions have been founded around prophets whose claims to divinity have been more modest than what Obama claims for himself.

So what sort of person would be "surprised" at his feet of clay? The same sort that would be stupid enough to believe that wealth redistribution by force is a good idea, or that the the Constitution is alive, or that the government should (or even can) pay for their health care or mortgage.

In other words people whose critical thinking abilities are so underdeveloped that they have no business even being near a voting booth.

I am somewhat deaf, I never heard Obama speak, instead I read the transcripts. In his speeches before the election, he said nothing. It seems that he said nothing very well, in a beautifully modulated baritone. He was elected with 52% of the vote.

The trouble is, he got the vast majority of the "educated class", the univerity profs, the media types, the folks that keep constantly telling me they're smarter than us plebians.

Well, if you educated folks are dumb enough not to read the effing words and see that, no matter how pleasent the voice, the words meant nothing, you really make me fear for the future of the Republic.

AJ Lynch said... "Fraud. Unfortunately, that is the best way to describe the president. And I am not referring to the birther BS."

And of course you are partially wrong.Tribe, during the Resolution 511 hearings defined Natural Born Citizen as being "born within a country's territory AND ALLEGIANCE".He very well knows that Obama is ineligible (as does Obama).Not only is McCain not a Natural Born Citizen since he was born in Colon, Panama and was born a Panamanian citizen as well as a US Citizen, Obama is not a Natural Born Citizen because he was ADMITTEDLY born a British citizen (father Kenyan). Law profs like Volokh and Althouse should know this. Have they been shut up, or are they just incompetent?Althouse voted for a man who she should have seen as dangerous to the Republic, and she now rationalizes it.

phew ! good day to be away from the blogs. you all went to town venting on this one, eh ?

I agree with the professor's response to the Dowd piece. When she said be critical -- I hope she meant be critical of the President's performance AND be critical of your expectation that he soothe you. That later expectation is is really jeuvenille and bizarre in my opinion. A grown woman, and a feminist demanding of the Pres that he soothe her in this way is just pathetic.

No it isn't. It's called leadership, you stupid twat. A real leader can inspire people to do things they normally wouldn't do, not against their will, but to the betterment of themselves. A willing and capable leader can in times of difficulty put people at ease because when things go bad and they often do at times, a good leader knows how to take charge and get things done and inspire confidence and the full backing of the people he/she is leading. It's a reciprocal exchange and one that this presidential fool is neither willing nor capable of dealing with or engendering confidence in people because he is neither willing nor capable simply because he doesn't possess the quality required to be a leader.

He is involved because the oil wells are over 50 miles from the shore and that is beyond what the state controls. That is why he is involved and should have been involved all along. His executive departments are responsible for the policing of this operation and they failed big time. Trying now to push the blame off on someone else but it belongs right square on this administration.